The early web search engine created by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva was W3Catalog.
W3Catalog was first released on September 2, 1993, making it one of the web's earliest search engines. Nierstrasz developed it while working at the University of Geneva, during the formative period when searchable web resources were still largely experimental.
Unlike crawler-based engines that attempted to discover pages automatically, W3Catalog initially relied on existing, manually maintained lists of web resources. It mirrored those lists, reformatted their contents into individual entries, and offered a Perl-based front end for dynamic queries. The software was built as an extension to Tony Sanders's Plexus web server because the Common Gateway Interface had not yet become available.
The project was originally called jughead before being renamed W3Catalog. It was retired on November 8, 1996. Its approach illustrates how early search tools often organized curated catalogs rather than continuously crawling the entire web.